Directional selection on cold tolerance does not constrain plastic capacity in a butterfly

BMC Evolutionary Biology

Research Article

Klaus Fischer¹  Anneke Dierks¹  Kristin Franke¹ 

[1] Department of Animal Ecology, Zoological Institute and Museum, University of Greifswald, J.-S. Bachstraße 11/12, D-17489, Greifswald, Germany;

关键词: Artificial selection;    Bicyclus anynana;    Constraint;    Genetic adaptation;    Genotype by environment interaction;    Phenotypic plasticity;    Temperature stress resistance;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2148-12-235

 received in 2012-07-04, accepted in 2012-11-27,  发布年份 2012

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundOrganisms may respond to environmental change by means of genetic adaptation, phenotypic plasticity or both, which may result in genotype-environment interactions (G x E) if genotypes differ in their phenotypic response. We here specifically target the latter source of variation (i.e. G x E) by comparing plastic responses among lines of the tropical butterfly Bicyclus anynana that had been selected for increased cold tolerance and according controls. Our main aim here was to test the hypothesis that directional selection on cold tolerance will interfere with plastic capacities.ResultsPlastic responses to temperature and feeding treatments were strong, with e.g. higher compared to lower temperatures reducing cold tolerance, longevity, pupal mass, and development time. We report a number of statistically significant genotype-environment interactions (i.e. interactions between selection regime and environmental variables), but most of these were not consistent across treatment groups. We found some evidence though for larger plastic responses to different rearing temperatures in the selection compared to the control lines, while plastic responses to different adult temperatures and feeding treatments were overall very similar across selection regimes.ConclusionOur results indicate that plastic capacities are not always constrained by directional selection (on cold tolerance) and therefore genetic changes in trait means, but may operate independently.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Franke et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2012. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.